{"id":996,"date":"2020-04-17T03:12:24","date_gmt":"2020-04-17T03:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=996"},"modified":"2020-04-17T15:15:04","modified_gmt":"2020-04-17T15:15:04","slug":"some-background","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/bsclark\/some-background\/","title":{"rendered":"Some background"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think that <em>Heart of a Dog <\/em>is a rather hilarious piece in our introduction to the Communist Revolution, more specifically a pointed humorous satire of those bubbling ideas. The book itself as an interesting history, initially not allowed to be published after its completion in 1925. The manuscript was actually taken from Bulgakov, and he had to put an effort in to retrieving the unique copy before the work was trashed! It was only published on Russian soil in 1987.<\/p>\n<p>There is speculation that the book\u2019s plot was loosely based off of a controversial Franco-Russian doctor Serge Voronoff, who experimented with grafting Dog and Monkey testicles to men to \u201crejuvenate\u201d things like sex drive, basically give older men hormones to be younger. Voronoff grew incredibly wealthy off of his procedures and was a sort of celebrity in French circles. He is even alluded to in a E. E. Cummings poem. On the verge of transplantation science, Voronoff did radically liberal procedures that many today would deem unethical. His xenotransplantations are something straight out of a science fiction book, but yet were a commonly known procedure for the ultra-wealth of the early 20<sup>th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n<p>Bulgakov grabs Voronoff\u2019s ridiculousness and (sorry for the pun) grafts it onto the growing ideas of bolshevisms within Russia. It is no mistake that the drunkard whose parts were transplanted into the dog has Bolshevik sympathies. Bulgakov is crafting a sort of allegory for the transfiguration of the lower class of Russia, those who are uneducated and un-modernized, and showing how ideas of Bolshevisms lead towards those former peasant people absurdly entering \u201ccivilized\u201d society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think that Heart of a Dog is a rather hilarious piece in our introduction to the Communist Revolution, more specifically a pointed humorous satire of those bubbling ideas. The book itself as an interesting history, initially not allowed to be published after its completion in 1925. The manuscript was actually taken from Bulgakov, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":688,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-10-building-the-ussr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/688"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}